We tried Amazon's $50 tablet -- here's what it's like

If you are in the market for a basic tablet and don’t want to break the bank, this might be the one for you. Amazon recently unveiled its Fire 7 tablet, and the cheapest version sells for just $US50. Business Insider tech reporter Avery Hartmans spent a week with one to see what it’s like.

The Amazon Fire 7 is one of the newest and cheapest in Amazon’s line of Fire tablets. Honestly, it’s a really good tablet for what it is. You can do the most basic needs on it, from browsing the Web, to watching videos, to trying out apps and games, but it doesn’t do a whole lot more than that.

The tablet has a seven-inch display, but it’s not HD. It comes in 8 or 16 GB of internal storage. The larger size will cost $US70, as opposed to $US50. If you need to add more, it has a micro SD slot for up to 256 GB of storage.

The tablet has a 1.3 gigahertz quad-core processor, and it works just fine for streaming or for playing games. If you open a ton of browser tabs though, it might lag a little bit.

It also comes in 4 colours: black, yellow, blue, and red.

One of the great things about this tablet is that it is Alexa-enabled. It also has all of Amazon’s apps on it, so you can read your Kindle books, you can surf the Web, and you can download some other games. You can’t download any Google apps. So you can’t get Gmail on there, you can’t have Google Maps or anything like that. But you can also use Hulu or Netflix.

It does have pretty good battery life. The battery will probably last about 8 to 10 hours on a single charge.

I really like using this tablet. For reading, it’s actually perfect. Because it fits right in the palm of your hand. The tablet is super lightweight and durable, but if you need one you can get a case, and it doubles as a stand.

If you’re a Prime member, you’re going to love using this tablet. You can load your Prime Membership right on here, so you can shop, you can read books, you can watch movies, you can listen to music. There are a lot of ads and promotions on this tablet, but you can pay to remove them. And if you’re a Prime number, it probably won’t really bother you anyway, because it will show things that you’ve shopped for in the past, or books that you read previously in the Kindle Store.

Another downside is that the camera is pretty terrible. It’s very low-resolution, and you’re not going to be impressed by it. But most people probably aren’t using their tablet to take photos anyway.

So this tablet is a lot more basic than something like an iPad, but if you really only needed to surf the Web, or to play games, or use it while you’re sitting on your couch at night, it will get the job done.

Its closest competitor is actually another Amazon tablet: the Fire 8. Which is a little bit bigger, a little bit nicer, and it has more storage. That one will cost you $US80 though.

After using this tablet for about a week, I would definitely buy it. For $US50, you really can’t beat the price , and you’re getting a lot for your money.

The Insider Picks team writes about stuff we think you’ll like. We aim to highlight products and services you might find interesting, and if you buy them, we may get a small share of the revenue from the sale from our commerce partners, including Amazon. Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon, is an investor in Business Insider, the US partner of BI Australia’s publishing company Allure Media, through his personal investment company Bezos Expeditions.